Ritually real

This is the bulk of an email written by Taylor Burton-Edwards, who is with the General Board of Discipleship of the UMC and also a member of the Order of St. Luke, which I affiliate with. This is a thought provoking connection between ritual practice, neuroscience, and the experience of God.

What Is Ritual Realism?
Actually, I don't know exactly where this phrase came from. I may have
coined it, I don't know. But it seems to me to capture, as does Sr Sarah's
excellent description of real presence, what I am finding to be a point of
convergence in the circles where I travel in the UMC and ecumenically.

If I were to try to summarize what I mean by it, or what I understand it to
mean, it would be this:
What we do in ritual is just as real as what we do in other venues of our
discipleship to Jesus Christ. Ritual is not merely metaphorizing our truth
before God. Ritual action compresses and intensifies the reality of our
lives with God and each other.

Put positively, what ritual can accomplish, in this sense, is a powerful
connection by all present with what is "really real" or "real beyond real."
This kind of perception of "super-reality" that emerges both from ritual
action and from more intensive "spiritual practices"over time is now being
explored rather deeply in both ritual studies and neuroscience. I would
commend Newberg and d'Aquili's "Why God Won't Go Away" for one of the more
recent explorations in this direction. Newber's work is also being featured
this week on All Things Considered. Yesterday's installment (transcript and
audio) is here:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104310443 Barbara
Bradley Hagerty's new book, Fingerprints of God, also explores this
territory. (See the Time Magazine interview and review, here:
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1898804,00.html

Given that ritual and spiritual practice have this capacity to connect
people to the "really real," what happens in ritual does matter. The symbols
matter-- they are not "merely referential." We are not pretending, but we
are making believe. From a neuroscientific perspective, we are wiring our
brains and strengthening the neuronal connections every time we repeat the
same practices. This is why for those who receive the Eucharist regularly,
for example, there is actually not a sense that it is "less important" over
time. Quite the reverse: the importance is amplified, the reality more
concretely felt-- perhaps not in each instance, but definitely so over time.

Put negatively, the failure to recognize how our brains are wired for ritual
realism, and not just for "pretending," means we create the potential to
reinforce actual neural disjunctions for people every time we "interrupt"
the reality of what we're doing with any sort of "explanation" that says,
"Well, we "say" this is the body of Christ, but, you know, we don't really
MEAN that."

That neuronal disconnect-- and its reinforcement-- can happen through words,
symbols, or actions. I've just given an example of the words. Or, one of my
pet peeves, not singing AMEN at the end of "Praise to the Lord, the
Almighty" when the final line is "Let the Amen, sound from God's people
again, gladly forever adoring"... and then instead, "You may be seated." An
example of symbols doing this might be the use of hardly any water in
baptism, or the use of bad tasting bread or wine/juice at the Eucharist, or
not actually reading from scripture in the service of the word. Examples of
actions doing this include reading rather than praying the Eucharistic
prayer, failing to use any sort of "manual acts" (failing to embody the
prayer), or, as the example that started the previous thread, treating the
consecrated bread and wine with disrespect, thus violating the principle of
real presence we SAY we believe.

Ritual realism, among other things, invites us to recognize how our brains
actually work and so to embody by our words, our symbols, and our actions
such coherence between what we say, what we show, what we sense (taste,
hear, smell, see and touch), and what we do (gesture, rhythm, motion) that
no neuronal disjunctions take place. When these things happen with deep
coherence, stronger neuronal bonds are made and deeper encounters with God
are made more possible for all in the assembly.

Transubstantiation and consubstantiation, as I see them, are both ways of
trying to explain, after the fact as it were, what is already sensed at the
Eucharist when it is offered well. We do encounter the body and blood of
Christ there in our own bodies. Transubstantiation tries to explain that in
categories of substance and accidents, borrowed from Plato and Aristotle.
Consubstantiation rejects that kind of description of ontology (that somehow
the substance, whatever that is, is more real than its physical form, the
accidents) and rather than claiming transformation of substance
(transsubtantiation) claims instead the real presence of Christ, perhaps
"added," "in, with and under the signs of bread and wine." Ritual realism
can live with either explanation but needs neither of them. What it cannot
live with is the insistence that the ONLY right way to understand this
mystery is either of them. That is because, from a neurological perspective,
the moment you leap from the ritual reality of the presence of Christ to an
explanation of the same, you have just created a disjunction, or at least
you have just interrupted the inputs from the limbic system and placed the
primary focus in the pre-frontal cortex. You have moved from the reality
itself, Christ present, to an abstraction of that reality, the explanation
of how.